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Most of you are aware that I record Brainstorm Brewery every week with Jason Alt and Corbin Hosler. I say "most" because I like to imagine that there's someone new reading my articles each week, in which case, welcome to the show!
Most of the time, we talk about bulk here. Buying bulk, selling bulk, bulk rares, bulk common/uncommons, picking bulk, selling picks from bulk – you name it. Every now and again, I jump ship and jam an article about something else, but it always comes Back to Basics.
I had an entire article drafted up for this week about bulk predictions for Commander 2017, which is releasing sooner than you think (August 25, 2017). I was going to discuss the possible tribes they would pick, and then focus on bulk picks that you should be aware of in those relevant tribes. Some could get reprinted, some might not. To make a long story short, I didn't really like the direction that the article was going ,so I scrapped the entire thing. (If you're interested, I could throw it on the burner for next week. Let me know in the comments section, or shout me out on Twitter @Rose0fthorns. I want to write about what you want to read about, because you're paying money to make money.)
So if I put that article on the back burner, what kind of text are we about to scroll down towards? Well, this is another experiment I'm going to test run. I mentioned Brainstorm Brewery earlier, and most of you will be familiar with the Breaking Bulk segment. We try to pick out cards that you probably didn't know about, or at least didn't know their value. It's the kind of segment where we go: "Hey did you know Tyrant's Familiar is up to $2.50 and not a bulk rare?" or "You can sell those Dawn Charms for $.50 each buylist."
So basically, it's a segment that basically is my wheelhouse in Magic finance. This article is going to contain a whole bunch of raw Breaking Bulk picks, and some attempted explanations as to why the cards are worth money. Some of it just boils down to "low supply," but hopefully you'll leave this article today with more knowledge of casual cards than when you came in. If you enjoy Breaking Bulk on Brainstorm Brewery, buckle up.
Let's start it off easy with a couple of more well-known picks. If you've ever wanted to throw together a Krenko, Mob Boss Commander deck, you've probably seen this little gobbo popping up on EDHrec.com. For a whole dollar, he turns your little 1/1s into a phalanx that can take down the Voltron-est of decks with first striking goodness. The scarcity of Shadowmoor makes this guy hard to come by, but he's close to mandatory for anyone looking to win through combat damage with their Goblins.
My first Pauper deck I ever built had this card in it, combined with Kiln Fiend and Wee Dragonauts following the release of Rise of the Eldrazi. I played that deck in one event and learned my distate for Izzet colors, but this one-mana sorcery continues to entice less competitive players with the one-shot potential it allows. The rebound is less of a deal than the +1/+0 it offers, often giving a double striker or infect creature the last bit of reach to end a game. I've always been surprised by this card's lack of a reprint, which is probably the only thing holding it from the dime level of buylisting. If it ever gets hit in a Commander deck or other supplemental product, you should have a good chance to pick these up for cheap while holding onto them and waiting for the creep back upward.
Both of these guys are pickable, but only Mr. Silver gets the rights to being worth more than a dime at the moment. Sometimes stores will run out of Blood Knights and offer quarters on them to restock, but the real prize is the Duel Deck Silver Knight. You can off that guy for at least 50 cents, and it's really common for that card to be left behind once all the rares have been pillaged. People will pull out Thunder Dragon because they don't want to "leave the good stuff", but then Spidersilk Armor and Silver Knight are yours for the taking. Duel Decks are extremely easy money, especially when combined with new artwork. Even the aforementioned Bloodmark Mentor comes in this product, making it easy to pull even if you don't come across Shadowmoor block bulk very often.
Here's another version of Duel Decks ramping up the prices of commons with artwork changes. While most Doom Blade effects aren't really worth picking unless they're Standard-legal, this version of Snuff Out sidles up right next to Go for the Throat in terms of buylist power. You know that 78-card unsleeved casual player we talk a lot about in this column? This is their card, and this is their version of that card. They want to play Liliana Vess with Liliana's Caress, while playing other cards that feature the Dominaran necromancer in every variation; flavor text, card art, etc.
There's a niche Spirits deck running around in Modern, that plays off Geist of Saint Traft and Steel of the Godhead. If not interacted with quickly, the deck can end games out of nowhere and is a lot of fun to play when your opponent has to read your Tallowisp. Obviously, the fact that it only has one printing from Betrayers of Kamigawa helps the price point of $1 as well, and the rest of the value comes from those invisible casual players we all know and love. Breya doesn't really play enough Spirits to make it worth running, so I keep finding these guys in "picked" Kamigawa bulk.
Born of the Gods gets a mostly well-deserved reputation for being a hot dumpster fire of a set. The most expensive mythics don't even hit $10, leaving box value at below $50. Yuck. I think the commons and uncommons have a similar bad reputation, but it's undeserved: there's some goodies in this set such as Sunbond. You can ship these off at 40 or 50 cents a piece, higher than the fifth-most-expensive non-mythic rare in the set. Searing Blood and Archetype of Courage are similar heroes that have made BNG uncommons worth pulling from.
Alright, let's interlude with a more recent card. I picked a couple playsets of these from "picked" Aether Revolt bulk, which basically means I took out the rares and Fatal Pushes. Little do people know, this miniature Vampire Nighthawk is worth more than the original vampire himself. A dozen reprints will do that to a 2/3 flier, even if he is still solidly 25 cents on most buylists. Still, this card curves out into lords much more efficiently, and I can see it creeping towards $1 as AER gets further and further away from being the hot goodness. Ironically, you can scale down the graph of Fatal Push to predict how this card will go up in price over time. We see Push hitting $9 now because of how little Revolt was opened, so expect casuals to dry up the supply of this card by putting it in unsleeved vampire decks.
The first step in event preparation is listing all the information available to you at Level 0. As everything we do from here will undoubtedly be tied both to information and speculation from this point, having a visual guide to the “knowns” will help us from straying too far down the rabbit hole, keep us on track, and give us a clear goal to work for. Here’s my list of knowns, two weeks ahead of Baltimore.
Time and prior knowledge are closely tied, to the point where they should probably be equal on this list. In an ideal world, we’d love to be able to systematically work through our initial format assumptions, proving and disproving, moving closer to the final result with each game played. In reality, we never have enough time to do all the exploring we’d like to do, and some leads result in dead ends, or even backward steps as we spend time tuning archetypes that we later find fall short. It’s no secret that the best-performing players have ways of beating father time, be they teams, Facebook information groups, or sources of expertise that they can rely on to point them in the right direction or specialize the work.
What’s immediately apparent to me is Eldrazi Tron’s identity in the field not as a ramp-combo deck, 
Affinity is well-positioned to capitalize on a field where the best aggro deck doesn’t play a creature on turn one. Thoughtseize and discard are poor against a strategy that dumps its hand on turn two, as is a cavalier approach to one’s life total. Both are core tenets of Death’s Shadow, the deck on everyone’s radar. While the rest of the format continues to warp itself around Fatal Push, Affinity is playing the same list from years ago, with only a few minor changes. It still dies to Stony Silence, but that doesn’t matter, as Stony Silence and Affinity have existed side by side for years and the deck continues to be a staple of the top tables.
always an option, I decided to test for free online. With actual free software. I wasn't willing to pay MODO for this crazed idea.
I cannot say that this disproves my overall theory, because I'm told the strategy actually works in Lantern decks. I've even received testimonials on this subject. I don't know if they're true or even plausible, as I'd rather chew my own head off than play Lantern. That may be the real answer though. If you have to go as far as to play Lantern Control for an idea to be good, it might not be worth it.
cards I've tested so far are believed to boost fair decks. This was borne out by your feedback.
Look, I've heard it all. It all. You've made these arguments about unbanning the Elf repeatedly, and I have repeatedly answered them. Henceforth, I will respond simply with "No, because Bloodbraid Elf." Deathrite was the real problem at the time, but Bloodbraid was never innocent. It has always been a format-defining card and frustratingly overpowered. Cascade for value has never been fun to play against or good for the game as a whole.
The cards will first be tested in the decks that got them banned. This will be done like the previous tests. After that, I will repeat the tests with UW Control. I picked UW because it is a fair blue deck that is performing reasonably well in the current meta, or at least better than other versions. Yes, there may be better homes for both cards in a vacuum, but looking at the current metagame, I doubt either card will have much effect outside of UW. Grixis Control is not doing as well, and RUG Scapeshift is no longer viable. Even if either card is utterly busted, I don't think the deck will get enough of a boost to produce a decent result. Going from unplayable to reasonable would be an interesting result, but I'm not willing to spend all my time on such a gamble.
Rock is historically one of the strongest archetypes in Modern. Until recently, Jund has policed the format with an iron fist; today, the 
In fact, the word tempo comes from the Italian for "time" (as seen in sheet music). It's an in-game mechanic as fundamental as card advantage, but less tangible, and therefore tougher to grasp. To understand tempo, it helps to think of mana as time (you know, like Dad always used to say---"time is mana!"). It takes time to produce mana; players are only allowed one land drop per turn, and lands can only tap for mana once each turn.
Tempo decks spend their early turns playing threats, and subsequent turns disrupting opponents while their threats close out the game unmolested. Since cheap threats come down in the early-game, when opponents are less likely to have mana available for interacting, soft permission and taxing effects prove ideal forms of disruption with which to protect those threats. These types of cards are also the most likely to steal tempo from opponents, who often feel like they're on the edge of resolving some meaningful spell all game, but suffer defeat what always seems like one turn too early. Midrange decks have mana set aside in the early game exactly for interacting, which makes tempo strategies easy prey for them.
Veteran readers will notice that "thresh" is a new name I've given to what I used to call grow decks. Like "tempo," "grow" is a loaded word with a convoluted history and multiple meanings*---in other words, the type of term I'd like to avoid if able. I think "thresh" more accurately reflects an important aspect of these decks: that they'll happily throw away cards in exchange for a tempo advantage, and closely budget their resources (especially mana) throughout the duration of most games.
Tempo decks want to defeat opponents before they can execute their gameplans, and midrange decks want to bring the game to a state in which an opponent's game plan isn't impactful enough. It's no wonder, then, that BGx has always struggled against Tron; all the Thoughtseizes in the world won't bring the game to a point at which Tron cares about Olivia Voldaren, or at which Jund and Abzan can laugh off Ugin, the Spirit Dragon. BGx's only realistic option in this matchup is to assume a tempo role, playing threats as quickly as possible and then disrupting with Fulminator Mage or Crumble to Dust while praying, against all odds, to deal 20 damage in time.
